European Journal of Molecular & Clinical Medicine

Abstract

Immigrants usually need to be protected as they are in a higher risk of physical, psychological and interaction problems with lack of health protection. This study has been carried out to explore the awareness of the immigrant regarding the healthcare services with their accessibility and utilization to the available services. The study involved 300 immigrants at Shah Alam city who were approached by random sampling. Most of the study participants were from Indonesia (31.3%), Bangladesh (20.3%), India (19.0%), China (12.3%), Pakistan (10.0%), Maldives (3.0%) with few other nationalities. Results showed that most of the study participants have no financial support to the healthcare services (60.3%). Most of participants consider their knowledge about the available healthcare services very good (67.7%) or good (26.7%) while they consider their usage to these services is poor (46.3%) or very poor (31.7%) and they are mostly using the government (32.7%) and private (30%) hospitals. The main source of information to immigrants regarding the available healthcare services is through friends (49.7%) then media (33.7%). Although 83.7% of the study respondents self-reported their health status as very good and 51% have no chronic disease, 90.7% are receiving regular medications. In the last 12 months, 0.3% of the respondents had more than 6 visits to outpatient clinics and 1% had more than 6 times need for word admission. It is concluded that most of immigrants in Shah Alam, Malaysia has high level of awareness of the healthcare services in spite of low utilization of these services. Limited accessibility of the healthcare services is mostly observed among those with lower income. It is recommended to have a wider study including more range of different nationalities of immigrants.